Sat - March 20, 2004

Their reaction highlights what was, until this month, a fundamental, yet unspoken difference in perspective between the United States and its allies in the war on terror. Namely, that everything changed in American thinking about terrorism after September 11, 2001, while this wasn't universally true in Europe. If Europeans viewed 9-11 with horror, many also saw the attack as a regional conflict—the undesirable but perhaps understandable result of years of U.S. meddling and bullying in the Middle East.

Now that this view has been irrevocably shaken by a single devastating attack that killed 202 people and injured more than 1,800, some spokesmen for the Spanish left have nevertheless declared the deployment of 1,300 Spanish soldiers in the reconstruction of Iraq to be the root cause of the tragedy. If in blaming themselves the Spanish assume undue culpability, who can fault them for clinging to the hope that appeasement means peace and isolationism safety?

Who among us would not desperately like to return to safer, more comprehensible times?

But safety does not lie in faulty syllogisms any more than nobility lies in tilting at windmills. The indiscriminate fanatics who exploded multiple bombs in Madrid's subways would not stop at destroying Western politics or Western ideologies, Western polities or Western ways of life. They want to destroy us. All of us. Preferably in large numbers, without warning.

And the difficult truth is that politics can neither excuse nor prevent such acts.

The difficult truth is that there are no "off sides" in the the war on terror.

The difficult truth is that retreat is impossible in a war where every school, every synagogue, every home, every office, every sporting event, and every subway comprises a front line.

The difficult truth is that innocence is impossible when every feeble old man and newborn child is equally a combatant in the eyes of the enemy.

Let the Spanish lick their wounds and bury their honored dead. Let them grieve and work through their shock and their horror. They have my sympathy. Sooner or later, however, they will have to shrug off the self-deluding politics of political convenience.

Because peace through appeasement is no lasting peace and the fervent hope that terrorists will attack not here but there is shameful strategy in a world that can harbor no refuge for small-minded men with bigger bombs.

Spain wants a siesta from the war on terror. So would we all.